Nucleic acids are a universal signature of biological information. The ability to rapidly detect nucleic acids with high sensitivity and single-base specificity on a portable platform has the potential to revolutionize diagnosis and monitoring for many diseases, provide valuable epidemiological information, and serve as a generalizable scientific tool. Although many methods have been developed for detecting nucleic acids (Du et al., 2017; Green et al., 2014; Kumar et al., 2014; Pardee et al., 2014; Pardee et al., 2016; Urdea et al., 2006), they inevitably suffer from trade-offs among sensitivity, specificity, simplicity, and speed. For example, qPCR approaches are sensitive but are expensive and rely on complex instrumentation, limiting usability to highly trained operators in laboratory settings. Other approaches, such as new methods combining isothermal nucleic acid amplification with portable platforms (Du et al., 2017; Pardee et al., 2016), offer high detection specificity in a point-of-care (POC) setting, but have somewhat limited applications due to low sensitivity. As nucleic acid diagnostics become increasingly relevant for a variety of healthcare applications, detection technologies that provide high specificity and sensitivity at low cost would be of great utility in both clinical and basic research settings.